fairy tale – Kenzie Leong's Creations

Gracious Hosts (3/3)

Rahim had been little more than a boy, the first time he laid eyes upon a fairy. He’d been sitting beneath his favorite tree, an elm with ample shade not far from the home where his parents raised him. From early childhood to later youth, he had sat beneath it to read and write, until the day a deer with leaves and blossoms growing from its antlers stepped out from behind it, gazed at him for a moment, and began to walk deeper into the woods

Rahim had followed it, fool that he was, until a chorus of chittering laughter reached his ears. A crowd of fairies had crawled and slithered from the carpet of loam, grasped his clothes, and pulled him deeper into the darkness. A mortal! they had laughed. Come, come with us and serve, our lady has use for your long legs and strong back. Then one unlucky fairy had reached his hand, and found the cold iron rings on his fingers. Rahim had stumbled back onto the road in a daze, to find that night had fallen and he was very hungry.

He was not that foolish boy anymore. Against his own will, he was both a warrior and a king, with hundreds of subjects turning out to celebrate the birth of his first child. But as he watched Lady Eisendusk step into the town square like a shadow to join them, he felt suddenly very small and cold and hungry again.

Gracious Hosts (2/3)

Asha’s father was a wiser man than Rahim’s grandfather had been. Rather than resting his fate on the patronage of one of the continent’s fair-weather kings, he’d kept his business to himself, constantly on the move whenever another warlord crested the horizon. A lack of permanent roots had been a small price to pay for deep pockets. Rahim had been a scholar with a decent mind for numbers when Asha married him.

And now here he was, another fair-weather ruler with a storm on the horizon.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

He wasn’t sure who he was addressing—Asha reading a letter in her favorite chair, Mama with her needle letting out one of Asha’s gowns, Baba lightly napping by the window, or Freda, the midwife’s daughter, humming as she swept.

Gracious Hosts (1/3)

Lord Armel fell in the late afternoon, three months after the battle began. It was a glorious fall; an enemy charge had scattered his men, and he’d met them singlehanded. Dozens of warriors had fallen before him, and in the end it was impossible to say which sword or arrow had dealt the final blow. He had died well, but he had died.

Oh, thought Rahim, as Lord Armel’s horse cantered back to the Garnian line, dragging its master’s body by one foot still caught in the stirrup. We’re going to lose.